Wounds Left Well Enough Alone
by alwaysimagined
Summary: Usually, when he talked about Loki, she tried to distract him. But she was so tired and he was so...everything about him was just so much all the time and she always felt like she was so little and sometimes a dark, horrible part of her wanted to turn and tell him that she had problems, too.


Thor was always so solid. Curling up with him was like pressing against a wall; she couldn't even feel the cold of the night air where they lay and watched the meteor shower. Whenever she lay with Thor, Jane always felt supported and well tethered, like everything in her life was steady. She could pretend, curled up with Thor, that when she woke up he would always be there, right next to her where sometimes she felt he belonged.

(She wouldn't wake up and see him on the news, fighting for all that was good and honorable while she drank instant coffee and wondered '_If he died, would he think of me?'_ and hated herself for the rest of the morning.)

Thor bent his head down and kissed her shoulder. She sighed and wriggled up against him further, trying to breathe in his scent. Faintly, she could feel him smile against her neck. When he spoke, his beard tickled her skin.

"My brother and I used to watch meteor showers." Jane froze. And wished, not for the first time, that she could stop conversations from coming just by wanting them to stop. "As children. He'd run into my rooms in the middle of the night and hop up and down on my bed. 'Brother! Brother!', he'd say," Thor chuckled slightly. Jane's heart hurt. "'Come outside! You have to watch the stars with me!'"

She never knew what to do when he brought up Loki. She knew, of course she knew, that the only reason he did was because there was no one else who would listen. He trusted her and trusted that he could say all these things that he _needed_ to say without her judging him and while she was grateful for that trust—happy for that one secure place she could hold in his heart above all others—she would also give anything in the world to make him stop.

Because he always looked so heart-broken whenever he talked about his brother, like a little boy who just found out his pet had died and wouldn't be coming back, and what were you supposed to do with a millennia-old warrior whose eyes looked shattered when he thought of him?

Usually, she tried to distract him. Kissed him or hugged him or brought him more food or showed him something Darcy had sent her on the computer or suggested a trip or something. _Anything._

But it never seemed like it was enough and he looked so sad and she was so _tired_. Tired because she spent all day researching and experimenting and worrying and also tired because he was just _so much._ Everything about him was just _so much_ all the time and she always felt like she was so little and sometimes a dark, horrible part of her wanted to turn and tell him that she had family problems too.

He wasn't alone. He didn't have a monopoly on dysfunction. She had a family, too. It wasn't like only ethereal, god-like beings with near-infinite powers were the only ones with any claim to tragedy. Little people had tragedy, too.

She imagined, sometimes. Telling him that. When she was at her most worried and confused and lonely.

That wouldn't be fair, though. It wasn't his fault. Anything he didn't know about her wasn't his doing.

He'd come close, once. A week ago he'd picked up a picture of her as a child with people all around her at a table, everyone smiling, and asked _"Who's this?"_ and she'd told him _"An old birthday party picture. It's not important."_ And then tried everything in her power to distract him with tales of Earth parties so that she wouldn't have to circle around again and say _"My family."_

It wasn't a lie, really. Just an omission. That party really had been of a birthday party. The fact that it was also a photo of her family wasn't important.

Besides, her family hadn't been half as happy as in that photo—her dad and uncle standing up behind her, her arm around her cousin Anne's shoulders and Anne's around hers—in decades.

Not since her father and uncle's last published paper together, fifteen years ago. They'd researched things together constantly and then one day they'd researched something that won them a prize and spent the next five months before the award ceremony arguing over who deserved full credit for the research and who deserved to be a byline.

It was the most important debate they'd ever had together, apparently. And the first one to end up in conclusive. By the time they stopped arguing and started to lash out with cold, ugly silence instead, she and Anne had already picked sides and drifted apart even faster than their fathers had.

She'd kept that photograph out of a weird rush of sentiment and after Thor found it she put it away to make sure he wouldn't find it. Still, sometimes she wished he _would_ find it. Find it and ask about it so that she could tell him everything and he could comfort her and distract her and tell her that he loved her.

That wasn't how things would happen, though. Not really. He'd find it and instead of trying to distract her from things he'd try to _fix_ things. Get into his head that if he made her family better everything _else_ would be better, too. Find her cousin and declare repairing their relationship his new personal mission and then work at it and work at it in that super-focused way of his until he wouldn't even be able to really _see_ Jane and Anne anymore. Not really. He'd be seeing something else entirely, like that time he rescued that teenage boy from falling off that cliff and couldn't even really hear the boy say thank you, it seemed. Could only stare at his face like he expected someone else's face to be there instead.

And then when he discovered that things between her and Anne could _not_ be fixed—when he finally realized that some things broke and that was it, nothing could be done, nothing could be healed—his heart would break all over again.

And maybe Jane couldn't stop that. Maybe, she thought as she closed her eyes and turned her face against his chest, she couldn't fix his broken heart.

But, at the very least, she could try not to shatter the shards.


End file.
